July 2, 2017

This is the fourth year that I’m running the Integrative Software Engineering Workshop at the Ruppin Academic Center

As such I had the privilege to mentor the teams and guide them as they build a software project from scratch. The purpose is to give the students a taste of how a real project is being developed in the real world and let them experience all the steps involved. From finding an idea and making the analysis, and then implementing and delivering to the customer (me in this case). You may want to read about the projects from previous years, you can find them here:

This year, I had three teams, and the projects were very nice. It’s always fun seeing the teams grow and learning together, and i must admit that i’m always skeptic at the beginning about the teams ability to implement what they plan, but in the end they always succeed.

The Learning Process

In the first two weeks of the course the students were divided into teams and each team chose a project they wish to build and analyze the desired functionality as User Stories.
Afterwards, in the next weeks the teams worked in sprints (2 weeks).

Most of the students reached the workshop with very few tools in their arsenal – basic programming in C#, C++ and JS, and basic knowledge in data-structures. They had to learn by themselves and make the decisions after investigating the different alternatives. the only limit was to stick with the C#, JS and C++ since these the languages they know.

The Projects

Team 1 – DrawIt

The idea of this projec is to create an online game where participants create a game-room and the users in the room need to guess what the leading user is drawing. In each round the leading user is randomally picked by the system and then presented to a word that she needs to draw. The rest of the participant sees the drawing in real-time and need to guess the word.

Team 2 – MojiMe

This teams project was an emoji builder web application in which the user can create a library of emojies that she can later use to express her feelings.

They even created a matching outfit

Here are a few screenshot from their projects:

Team 3 – OpenDoor

This team created a system that allows an organization to control the doors and open them only to authorized personal. For this they used a arduin devide with a RFID Reader and Image Recognition with the Azure Cognitive Services

Beside the end-user system (The RFID reader and the camera) they also creatd a web management console that allows adding permanant users and temporary users and supervise the enterence attampts